Interviews
How Leigh Whannell Set Out to Make ‘The Invisible Man’ Scarier Than Ever Before [Interview]
The classic Universal Monsters are iconic figures that even a child can recognize, thanks to nearly a century of movies, toys, marketing, cereals and satires. So when it came time to remake The Invisible Man, writer/director Leigh Whannell had his work cut out for him. How do you make a character everybody knows, whose only gimmick is not being seen, a terrifying movie monster in the 21st century?
It’s a tricky question, but as Bloody-Disgusting learned from Whannell in a new interview, one that he almost instinctively knew how to answer.
“The Invisible Man was not something I was pursuing,” Leigh Whannell explained. “It was an idea that was presented to me. I was in a meeting and somebody suggested The Invisible Man, and pretty much instantaneously when they suggested this title a question was proposed, actually, in that meeting. How would YOU do this?”
“And just to fill the air time I was like, well, I would tell the story from the point of view of the victim,” Whannell said.
“It just seemed like the most obvious choice. If you put the villain in the spotlight and make him or her the central character, you demystify them. You don’t want to see the shark in the opening scene of Jaws. You want the unknown. And I just felt like the best tribute I could pay to this character was to make him scary again, in a modern context, and to do that I had to make him mysterious and unknowable. I don’t want to hang out with him. I want him to be terrorizing somebody.”
The original Universal Horror movie The Invisible Man starred Claude Rains as the title villain, and largely took place from his perspective, as a mad scientist with a superpower, eager to wreak havoc upon an unsuspecting world. Whannell’s version takes the opposite approach, and tells the story from the perspective of The Invisible Man’s ex-girlfriend, whom the title monster decides to cruelly stalk, torture and ultimately drive insane.
The new film is a very different approach from H.G. Wells’s original vision, and Whannell knows it.
“I did re-read [the novel], and once I read it I was like, okay, this is a different story, a different framework. I feel like these characters that are iconic, they’re so iconic and so malleable that they plug into anything,” Whannell said. “I mean Dracula and the Wolfman, when I think of them now I think of them in animated films like Hotel Transylvania.”
“They’re so familiar that it dilutes the tension. When these characters were first released they were terrifying. Over the course of time, they’ve almost become comedic. When I think of Frankenstein the first image that pops in my head – it just popped in my head then – is of The Munsters. So that’s what happens when someone becomes so ubiquitous they become safe, and when they become safe they’re not scary anymore,” Whannell said.
“I felt that happening with, say, Freddy Krueger. That first film was terrifying. He was unknowable. He was mysterious. Then by about Part 5 or 6 you’re hanging out with the guy!” Whannell recalls. “I remember that Fat Boys video. And that’s what happens.”
“To be scary we have to be mysterious, and that’s what I needed to do with this character.
“So I read the source material, I’m respectful of it, but I knew I wanted to take it in a very different direction. It wasn’t going to be a character study about a descent into madness, it was going to be a victim of this character,” Whannell said.
Of course, one of the tricks with the Invisible Man is actually filming him. It’s one thing to argue that what the audience doesn’t see is scarier than what they do see, but they still have to look at something. The solution Leigh Whannell settled on was to film the movie as though the Invisible Man was visible, with the camera cutting away to him or panning to the side as though he were in frame. But is he really there? How can we tell?
“I felt like very early on in those first few days when I got the job after that meeting, I quickly locked onto this idea of making empty spaces threatening,” Whannell explains. “And I felt like there was an opportunity here to point the camera at nothing and put the audience on edge. Usually, you’re pointing the camera at something. If it’s a ghost movie you might see a child standing in a corner, if it’s a monster movie you’ll see this monster. But with this movie, the monster is notable by his absence! So I just decided to make the camera autonomous, like it was a character in the film, and it would just drift off down hallways. And that was all really early on in the process that I decided to do that, or to try it at least.”
But that raises the question: if we could see the Invisible Man, would he actually always be there in the frame? How many scenes in The Invisible Man have the Invisible Man in them, without us knowing?
“I know where he is and where he isn’t,” Whannell notes. “I’ll say this, there’s only a couple of instances in the movie where he’s not there when the camera points. Most of the time we’re looking at him, we just don’t know exactly where he is.”
And although Leigh Whannell has extensive experience telling supernatural tales – as the writer and co-star of the blockbuster Insidious franchise – he’s quick to point out that, although The Invisible Man might seem a little like a ghost story, it’s anything but.
“For me what was interesting about this is that it wasn’t a ghost. It’s funny, if you think about the iconic horror monsters – certainly from the Universal stable – there’s this visual iconography about them. Fangs, fur, gills, there’s this stuff. But the Invisible Man is just a human being. That’s what interesting about him. He’s not a vampire, he’s not an alien, he’s just a human, and that’s one of the reasons I could see a way to modernize it,” Whannell explained.
“You know, if you’re dealing with vampires there’s a certain gothic quality that you have to pay attention to but I felt like with the Invisible Man you could make the David Fincher version of that movie. Make a grounded, reality-based film,” Whannell said.
And if the early reviews are any indication, it would seem like that’s just what he did. Find out for yourself when The Invisible Man lurks into theaters this weekend.
Interviews
Paul Tremblay on Fighting AI with Horror in New Novel ‘Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep’
Paul Tremblay didn’t start his writing career believing he’d be battling machines over the sanctity of his job, but like so many writers of his generation, the battle found him. In the years since Large Language Models (LLMs) and neural networks started gaining traction as an advertised shortcut to creativity, Tremblay has been active in lawsuits to prevent the use of his works in training AI models, and he’s found that, with each new project, he has to consider the possibility that some LLM, somewhere, is going to latch on to what he’s creating.
“Now I feel like I’m thinking about, ‘Man, how am I going to write things that would be really hard or impossible for an AI to replicate?’,” Tremblay told me, speaking by Zoom from his home in Massachusetts. “Maybe some of that is ego. I’m sure every writer thinks, ‘Oh, an AI could never write what I write.’ Yes, I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t part of the thought process.”
While that’s something Tremblay might consider with any new work at this point in his career, the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of A Head Full of Ghosts, The Cabin at the End of the World, and many other novels and short stories tackled it in a more direct way with his latest book. Inspired by Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, and the quirky humor of the Coen Brothers, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is Tremblay’s attempt at a sci-fi-horror mash-up that’s both darkly funny and existentially nightmarish. It’s also, in his own words, a screed against the movement by AI companies to supplant human artists.
“I didn’t want to make it too didactic, but no, I playfully described this book as an anti-AI screed,” he said. “This book, in particular, was driven by anger and frustration, for sure. Not every book is going to be driven that way.“
Despite the emotions that fueled it, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep does not read like a screed. Instead, wielding offbeat humor and tech concepts that feel both lived-in and frighteningly tactile, the book lays out tandem narratives all building to the same conclusion, each of them exploring our relationship to machine learning in a different way. One of these narratives belongs to Julia, a former gaming streamer looking for a new challenge in life, who gets a call from a California tech company with an interesting offer.
Paul Tremblay in documentary series “First Word on Horror”
The company has, it seems, implanted some new technology in a brain-dead middle-aged man which will, in theory, allow them to pilot the man’s body through a rudimentary, still-developing system of controls. Julia, with her gaming background, would be the pilot, in her own way just as much a test subject as the human vegetable she’s controlling.
Julia is a Gen Z streamer with an omnivorous pop culture appetite, inspired by Tremblay’s own adult children, who riffs on The Big Lebowski constantly and calls her strange new meat puppet “Bernie” in reference to Weekend at Bernie’s. Her wide frame of reference, and her interest in art and stories far beyond video games, is in part informed by Tremblay’s own experiences with Gen Z, and in part a response to AI companies who scrape art and culture as a means of consuming it for reference without really experiencing a story.
“I know that one of the arguments that OpenAI and other tech companies are trying to make is like, ‘Hey, you writers, you artists, you take pop culture, you take your influences, and you create something. That’s just the same thing that the bots are doing.’ And it’s just not,” Tremblay said. “I wanted to have Julia have her outlook informed by all this pop culture, and I wanted to make that feel really human as a way to show how inhuman the AI is.”
The other side of the story belongs to “Bernie,” who’s addressed in his point-of-view chapters as “You.” In these chapters, the technology in Bernie’s body starts to flicker images through his seemingly dead brain, delivering half-remembered imagery and perspective in a nod to the “hallucinations” of an AI model groping for understanding it can never reach. These chapters in particular show off Tremblay’s flair for formalist shake-ups, and echo the kind of hyperstimulated writing that Dick and Ellison made so influential.
“I think it was more just the general Philip K. Dick feeling of ‘The world is so strange,'” Tremblay said. “He’s a lot funnier, I think, than maybe a lot of people credit him. That’s definitely what I was thinking of when writing the book.“
Bernie’s chapters embody the strangeness of Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep, presenting imagery that’s at times puzzling, at times eerily filmic, and always unnerving. They also mirror Julia’s own journey in fascinating ways as the odd couple – the Gen Z gamer and the middle-aged vegetable – traverse the United States, and the tech in Bernie’s body wakes up to the possibilities of using his flesh for its own purposes. It’s a compelling narrative technique, but it presented some new writing challenges for Tremblay.
“I quickly realized I couldn’t write this book the same way I have in the past,” he said. “By that, I mean all my other novels I had written in the order in which it was presented, even things that are nonlinear, which is most of them. I knew I couldn’t do that in this book. It’s not a spoiler, but hopefully the readers figure out pretty early that the Bernie chapters are a little bit of a preview of the next chapter from Julia, what’s actually happening with Julia. It’s all refracted from him.”
Mary Roach’s Stiff
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep began with a simple image, inspired by Tremblay’s reading of Mary Roach‘s book chronicling the history of our treatment of corpses, Stiff. As he read, Tremblay imagined a body sitting on an airplane, remote-controlled by someone else. At the time, it was a “silly what-if” concept, filed away in his head. Years later, when he became an author suing a tech company to keep AI from scraping his work for ideas, it started to feel frighteningly plausible, taking the “silly what-if” into the territory of a high-concept horror show about what happens when we try to exploit and commodify uniquely human aspects of consciousness.
“It stuck with me,” Tremblay said of that what-if imagery. “And then a few years later, when I was a part of the case suing OpenAI on behalf of writers, that what-if suddenly didn’t seem as silly. The more I learned about how that corporation operates and without really any sort of ethical thought to anything, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to play with that. That’s actually happening.”
So, what if someone actually in favor of generative AI picks up Tremblay’s self-described “anti-AI screed?” He hopes that, at the very least, he’s made the ride enjoyable in a distinctly human way that might begin to reshape the conversation.
“I think that was another reason why I wanted to have the humor,” Tremblay said. “If people are reading this book who aren’t on the side of like, ‘Hey, LLMs taking authors’ books is bad,’ maybe if they read something that’s cut with some humor, that maybe they’ll be more easily swayed.”
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is now in bookstores everywhere.
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